My Pinebook Pro arrived today. I spent a little time poking around on it after dinner and am now typing this post up on it. I didn’t go in with crazy high expectations since I’m fairly experienced with working withLinux on the desktop with much more powerful hardware supporting it.
Here are my day one impressions so far:
1. It isn’t crazy fast for desktop-ish use so far. I’m running the Manjaro version that comes preinstalled on it and using KDE as my desktop environment and it doesn’t feel quite as responsive as my other machine but, of course, my other machines are for the most part i9 class processors with enough RAM that I scarcely even touch my swap partition so that comparison should surprise absolutely no one. For $200, it’s fucking great and it does everything I would expect and a whole bunch more. As long as you’re not expecting your inexpensive machine to miraculously hit Mach 1, I think this is a surprisingly great desktop experience. It probably won’t be my daily driver for heavy lifting tasks but it runs Chromium with the required gazillion tabs open, Guake, and a few other small applications without any noticeable difficulty.
2. Again, for the price, the hardware that you touch and interface with externally feels on par with some of the better Chromebooks. The screen is perfectly workable and clear. The keyboard is chicklet style and doesn’t yield at all when you’re typing. Trackpads in Linux have always been a bit of a sore spot for me since I tend to experience a ton of phantom clicks when text editing that are probably more the fault of the window manager/DE than the hardware but this one feels comfortable to use even with the constant fear that the cursor is going to magically move three lines up at any second. The trackpad is buttonless and requires a fair amount of force to generate a click which makes things a little louder than I’m accustomed to but those clicks are muted plastic thuds instead of the gunshots you’ll normally hear from cheap trackpad hardware.
3. Every other person has mentioned that the case is a complete fingerprint magnet and I cannot disagree with that assessment. After two hours of handling it looks like I simultaneously devoured a bag of potato chips while doing so with nary a shirt tail to wipe my freakishly oil covered hands on. This is not something I consider important but it becomes apparent pretty quickly that the pretty black case otherwise unadorned by a single logo is never going to look pretty again without swabbing it with an alcohol pad.
Anyway, those are my admittedly superficial impressions from the first couple hours of actually using this little beast. I’ll likely post more thoughts on it a little further into actual use. The very short review: It won’t ever be a primary machine for me but it’s a bit of a miracle in its price and quality bracket. The KDE battery widget says I still have eight hours of remaining battery life after using this laptop for around 45 minutes. I’d say that’s worth your time and money if you want to try something apart from the pack.